NATE’s National Writing Project Four Years On (2009-2013)In Our Own Hands

Simon Wrigley explains how teachers all over the UK have gained from joining the National Writing Project to help develop their own language and creativity, and that of their students.

This article was first published in NATE's magazine, 'Teaching English', 2013.

Jeni Smith and I founded NWP UK in 2009 in order to improve writing for teachers and their pupils. We wanted to share and develop what we had learnt from over twenty years’ experience of writing groups and workshops: that writing is learnt only partly through instruction. Writers of all ages also benefit from partnership, practice, experiment and reflection.

Writing progress in the UK had stalled, as Richard Andrews reported in 2008 when he advocated a national writing project. The teaching of writing had become overly concerned with structures, too assessment driven, and did not allow sufficient space for individuals to write in new ways which were meaningful to them. With the 2013 introduction of a KS2 grammar test, the assessment of writing has become even more atomised: pupils are graded by their ability to write without regard to how interesting, imaginative or thoughtful their writing might be. So the need for a more holistic view of writing hasn’t gone away. It has increased.

A further difficulty for teachers of writing is that publishers rush to create and supply materials to support the latest assessment target. There is no shortage of books which will supply straightforward solutions for anyone puzzling over the difficulties of grammar and spelling. Gwynne’s online grammar quiz will tell you instantly how competent you are. And several schemes offer the necessary elements for successful writing inbite-sized chunks, which are conveniently linear and de-contextualised. Most of these try to neutralise the very complexities which make writing worth reading. So ‘getting it right’ can become more important than ‘getting it true’. This can sideline deeper curriculum experiences, as senior leaders remorselessly chase those results whichwill declare the fastest gains in discernible progress and standards. But it seems that few are interested in questioning how writing is changing or the processes by which young people become authors of their own destinies as well as those the state may prescribe.

And where are teachers’ voices in all this? Who is speaking up for the profession, or collecting evidence to show that there are other ways of approaching writing, that there are other things writing can do for us, and that many young writers are sold short and disengaged by the dominant orthodoxies about structures, rules and conventions? What is writing after all, and what is good writing? Who decides?

We suggest that one answer lies in our own hands: hands with pens in them, or hands with fingers which tickle key-boards and then press ‘send’ or ‘post’: NWP hands.